The relationship between thematic, lexical, and syntactic features of written texts and personality traits

Abstract

The relationship between linguistic features of written texts and personality traits was investigated. Linguistic features used in this study were thematic (co-occurrence of the most frequent content words across participants), lexical (the maximum of new words) and syntactic (average sentence length). Personality traits were measured by VP+2 questionnaire standardized for Serbian population. Research was conducted on text materials collected from 114 Serbian participants (age 15-65), in their native tongue. Results showed that participants who gained low scores on Conscientiousness and high scores on Neuroticism and Negative Valence wrote about repeated daily activities and everyday life, but not about job-related matters or life perspective. Higher scores on Aggressiveness and Negative Valence coincided with writing about job-related matters and with the lower lexical richness. By showing that thematic content of text materials is affected by personality traits, these results support and expand previous findings regarding the relationship between personality and linguistic behaviour.